Digital+Natives,+Digital+Immigrants

Text adapted from:



Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. Retrieved February 13, 2012, from www.markprensky.com: http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf

By Marc Prensky

Today’s students are not just very different from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big change has taken place, – an event which changes things so much that there is absolutely no going back. This change is the arrival and rapid spread of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.

Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their whole lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college graduates have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.

It is now clear that as a result of this, today’s students think and process information very differently from students in the past. These differences go far further and deeper than most teachers realize. ‘Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures, ‘ says Dr. Bruce D. Perry of Baylor College of Medicine. It is very likely that our students’ brains have physically changed – and are different from ours – as a result of how they grew up. But whether or not this is really true, we can say with certainty that their thinking patterns have changed. What should we call these ‘new’ students of today? Some refer to them as the N-[for Net]-gen or D-[for digital]-gen. But the most useful designation I have found for them is Digital Natives. Our students today are all ‘native speakers’ of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.

So what does that make the rest of us? Those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become interested in and started using many or most types of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, Digital Immigrants. The importance of the difference is this: As Digital Immigrants learn – like all immigrants, some better than others – to adapt to their environment, they always keep, their foot in the past. This can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information second rather than first, or in reading the manual for a program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us to use it. Today’s older people were ‘socialized’ differently from their kids, and are now in the process of learning a new language. And a language learned later in life, scientists tell us, goes into a different part of the brain.

This is obvious to the Digital Natives – school often feels as if we’ve brought in a population of heavily accented, unintelligible foreigners to lecture them. They often can’t understand what the Immigrants are saying.

Here are some points to show these differences. Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked, or connected to people. They want instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to ‘serious’ work. (Does any of this sound familiar?)

But Digital Immigrants usually don't think these new skills are that important. These skills are almost totally foreign to the Immigrants, who themselves learned – and so choose to teach – slowly, step-by-step, one thing at a time, individually, and above all, seriously. But if Digital Immigrant educators really want to reach Digital Natives – i.e. all their students – they will have to change. It‟s high time for them to stop their grousing, and as the Nike motto of the Digital Native generation says, “Just do it!” They will succeed in the long run – and their successes will come that much sooner if their administrators support them.